Sometimes when I notice that there is something wrong with a listing ( such as the book associated with it was in the box that got wet ) but it is low priority, I will add three or four zeros to get it out of the way.
This guarantees that it will not sell ( or if it does, it will be worth my time to acquire another copy )
When I get all of the higher priority stuff done, then I can just search my inventory by price from high to low, and the listings that need to be fixed will pop up.

Sometimes when I notice that there is something wrong with a listing ( such as the book associated with it was in the box that got wet ) but it is low priority, I will add three or four zeros to get it out of the way.
This guarantees that it will not sell ( or if it does, it will be worth my time to acquire another copy )
When I get all of the higher priority stuff done, then I can just search my inventory by price from high to low, and the listings that need to be fixed will pop up.

Ditto what RMS said. Could be a simple placeholder as part of the seller’s inventory record-keeping process and/or price watching.

I set my price to $100 when I first list it. Because I use FBA, my repricing software doesn’t reprice until it is received by Amazon. If I see an item at $100, this is an easy indicator that it has not been received. In otherwords, it’s just a placeholder price.

I think the people who list books at these high prices do not actually have the item in stock. They probably list every single book as part of their inventory at a high price and if by chance they sell (if you list a million items, something will probably sell eventually) they but it from another seller or website and have it shipped to the customer.

I like the “space saving” theory. I would never try it because I’d be afraid that I would forget that I priced an item so high and it would just linger indefinitely in cyberspace and never get sold.

It seems to me that the sellers who are doing this are mega-sellers, and probably have huge inventories to manage and these listings may have slipped through their review process. Perhaps, as previously suggested, it could also be a software issue?

Supposedly, Amazon has implemented a new pricing error system, to help with this, but I’d be interested in their plan to catch all of the impossibly low prices some sellers post. I mean, if you sell a board game that’s gonna cost you $15.00 to ship, for a dollar, you’re paying your customer to take it, right?

Actually, I had someone from Amazon explain this to me. We have a product that is $39.00 and someone was selling it $9,999.00 so I called Amazon to see what was up with that.

They said that some sellers will list a product that they are not yet prepared to sell just to get the listing up. The seller will put a price on the product that they know will result in no sales. i don’t really understand the point of that but it sounded as good as any explanation that I could come up with.

I think your theory is the most plausible. I think those sellers are deliberately skewing the pricing algorithms, in a way that I can’t quite work through in my mind, thus can’t explain. Or, they are sellers who have multiple accounts. They want to make their price seem reasonable, by listing a phantom item at an impossible price. Or??

Also for reasons I can’t quite explain, I don’t like the idea of parking a nonsensical price in order to protect one’s inventory.

It seems like a price listed out there for the Amazon public should be a legitimate price!
I mean, wouldn’t we all cry foul if Walmart did something similar?

It should not be a way to safeguard one’s inventory or let the marketplace settle on a price.
I’m actually very surprised that Amazon allows this.

That’s a dumb way of keeping track of your inventory! Why don’t you just put it into your inventory with 1 and then go back and change your qty to 0? Then it is in “all” your inventory and also in your “inactive”. When you want to sell it, just go to inactive and activate it. Then you don’t stick some dumb ridiculous price on it, but simply change your inventory to 1 or however many you have.

Apparently you don’t quite get what an inventory system is all about and probably shouldn’t be selling on Amazon or anywhere else, as far as that goes.

I do know that sometimes when you put in the UPC, some people make up their own products and pricing and the system pulls up the item and wants to know if you will price match. That could be where some people are thinking, Heck, if that’s what this product is going for, why not?! I think that would be the real answer to your question.